The developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children remains understudied. This cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old children, and adults from Xiamen, China (n = 87, 44 males) investigated this issue using the McGurk paradigm with three levels of…

Visual information influences speech perception in both infants and adults. It is still unknown whether lexical representations are multisensory. To address this question, we exposed 18-month-old infants (n = 32) and adults (n = 32) to new word-object pairings: Participants either heard the acoustic form of the words or saw the talking face in…

In human adults, visual dominance emerges in several multisensory tasks. In children, auditory dominance has been reported up to 4 years of age. To establish when sensory dominance changes during development, 41 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were tested on the Colavita task (Experiment 1) and 32 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were…

Over their 1st year of life, infants' "universal" perception of the sounds of language narrows to encompass only those contrasts made in their native language (J. F. Werker & R. C. Tees, 1984). This research tested 40 infants in an eyetracking paradigm and showed that this pattern also holds for infants exposed to seen language--American Sign…

This study used eye-tracking methodology to assess audiovisual speech perception in 26 children ranging in age from 5 to 15 years, half with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and half with typical development. Given the characteristic reduction in gaze to the faces of others in children with ASD, it was hypothesized that they would show reduced…

Eight sets of paired auditory and visual stimuli were constructed. Each member of the auditory pair was matched by one member of the visual pair (e.g., ascending "tone/up arrow"; descending "tone/down arrow"). Sixty-one infants with a mean age of 11.4 months were presented matching and unmatching stimuli; total fixation time…

Examines, in two experiments, 5-month-old infants' sensitivity to auditory-visual specification of distance and direction of movement. One experiment presented two films with soundtracks in either a match or mismatch condition; the second showed the two films side-by-side with a single soundtrack appropriate to one. Infants demonstrated visual…

When presented simultaneously with equally discriminable, but unfamiliar, visual and auditory stimuli, 4-year-olds exhibited auditory dominance, processing only auditory information ( Sloutsky & Napolitano, 2003). The current study examined factors underlying auditory dominance. In 6 experiments, 4-year-olds (N181) were presented with auditory and…

Four experiments tested the hypothesis that the importance of linguistic labels for young children's conceptual organization stems from a privileged processing status of auditory input over visual input. Findings indicated that when auditory and visual stimuli were presented separately, 4-year-olds were likely to process both kinds of stimuli,…